It’s been an exciting few months for Functional Grains Centre staff and students.

Congratulations to PhD student Michelle Toutounji who represented Charles Sturt in the Asia Pacific Finals of the Three Minute Thesis and well done to all our students, Nancy Saji, Annie Riaz, Esther Callcott, Shiwangni Rao and Stephen Cork who took part in the CSU event.

I’m always proud to see our students engaging with the community, a good example is their participation in the Graham Centre for Agricultural Innovation’s Science and Agriculture Enrichment day. The event gives high school students a taste of science in action and it was great to see FGC students explaining how our research is developing new processes and products to benefit the entire grains value chain.

Sean and I travelled to China to visit Zhong Kai Zhou and his colleagues at Tianjin University of Science and Technology to establish a collaboration to work on our baijiu project. We managed to survive the obligatory baijiu testing and established some excellent collaborations.

Several FGC students have had the opportunity to participate in a number of workshops and conferences including the Innovation Generation conference and a Graham Centre sponsored workshop on presentation skills. Our students used the skills gained in this workshop at the Australasian Grain Science Association Conference held at Charles Sturt and supported by the FGC. Students and postdocs all worked hard at the conference by both presenting and chairing sessions. Rachael received the best student poster prize award and Esther again received an award for her excellent oral presentation.

In other good news, Rachael, Nancy, Michelle, Esther and Shiwangni have all received top-up scholarships from Agrifutures Australia. These top-ups will ensure the students will have the ability to complete their projects and produce high quality research outputs.

Finally I would like to congratulate PhD candidate Kyah Hester for being the first Australian Research Council (ARC) funded FGC student to submit their thesis for examination. I’m sure the examiners will like what they see!

Regards,

Chris

Photo caption: Dr Asgar Farahnaky and Professor Chris Blanchard, co-hosts of the 2018 AGSA conference. Read more about the conference here.